Blogs · Travel · · 6 min
A week in the Western Ghats
Six hundred kilometres, four forts and an unreasonable number of vada pav. What a week on the road through Maharashtra actually looks like.
Leaving at four in the morning
The only way to get out of Mumbai is to leave before the city wakes up. By five we were past Panvel with the windows down and the temperature dropping a degree every ten minutes. The Ghats do that — you climb for an hour and arrive somewhere that feels like a different country.
Forts that nobody visits
Every guidebook sends you to the same three. The interesting ones are the other forty — half-collapsed, unsigned, reached by a path that a farmer will point you toward if you ask. We spent a whole afternoon on one without seeing another person.
Somewhere between Malshej and Bhandardara
What you actually eat
Vegetarian on the road in Maharashtra is not a constraint, it is the default. Misal that removes the lining of your mouth, thalis that arrive faster than you can sit down, and vada pav from a cart that has been in the same spot for thirty years.
The bit nobody photographs
Six hours of driving in the rain with the wipers on their highest setting and a truck three feet off your bumper. It is part of it. The photographs are the twenty minutes either side.
The route
Roughly six hundred kilometres over seven days, anticlockwise out of Mumbai and back.
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Stops
- Mumbai — start and finish
- Malshej Ghat — two nights
- Harishchandragad — the long walk up
- Bhandardara — the lake
- Ratangad — the fort with the eye
- Igatpuri — last stop before home
Would I do it again
Immediately, and with less in the boot. Half of what we packed never came out, and the half that mattered was a torch, a power bank and a second pair of dry shoes.